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How to Protect Your Website from Negative SEO

The entire SEO industry experienced a major transformation over the past two years. As a result, many online marketers have dramatically changed their strategies. Ranking high in Google for competitive keywords is not as easy as it was three years ago.

Because black hat SEO is harder and harder to execute, and less and less likely to deliver results, a new type of SEO has emerged called “negative SEO.”

This is a guide that will help you understand what negative SEO is and how you can protect your business from becoming a victim. If you are serious about building your brand online and keeping it safe, this is something you should not ignore.

What is Negative SEO?

Negative SEO refers to the practice of using black hat and unethical techniques to sabotage a competitor’s rankings in search engines. Negative SEO attacks can take a number of different forms:

Hacking your website

Building hundreds or thousands of spammy links to your website

Copying your content and distributing it all over the internet

Pointing links to your website using keywords like Viagra, poker online, and many others

Creating fake social profiles and ruining your reputation online

Removing the best backlinks your website has

Is Negative SEO a Real Threat?

Yes, no doubt about that. Negative SEO is real, and numerous websites have had to deal with this problem. Preventing it is much easier than fixing it.

If you conduct a search on Fiverr for “negative SEO,” you will find over 15,000 people willing to do the work for only $5.

Also, black hat forums are full of stories from people who have succeeded with this technique.

Google has released the Disavow Tool to help webmasters deal with this problem, but the tool should be used with caution and only as a last resort.

Check out Matt Cutts’s answer to negative SEO:

It usually takes 2-4 weeks for the tool to work. Can you afford to have your website penalized for 1 month? No one can! I will show you how you can prevent these attacks and keep your business safe.

Enable email notifications and choose to receive alerts for all types of issues. Click “Save.”

This is just the first step. Now, let’s move to the important one, monitoring your backlinks profile.

2. Keep Track of Your Backlinks Profile

This is the most important action to take to prevent spammers from succeeding. Most often, they will perform negative SEO against your website by building low quality links or redirects. It is vitally important to know when someone is creating links or redirects to your website.

You can use tools like Ahrefs or Open Site Explorer, from time to time, to manually check if someone is building links to your website, but the one I recommend you use is MonitorBacklinks.com. It’s one of the best and easiest tools that can send you email alerts when your website gains or loses important backlinks.

Instead of having to manually check your backlinks every morning, Monitor Backlinks sends everything you need to know to your inbox. Here’s how you can use it:

Once you have created your account, it will require you to add your domain and connect it with your Google Analytics account.

It usually shows your backlinks immediately, but sometimes it can take a few minutes. By default, your settings are set to send you email notifications when your website receives new backlinks. This is what an email alert looks like:

3. Protect Your Best Backlinks

Very often, spammers will try to remove your best backlinks. They usually contact the website owner of the link, using your name, and they request the webmaster to remove your backlink.

To prevent this from happening, you can do two things:

When you communicate with webmasters, always use an email address from your domain, instead of using Gmail or Yahoo. This way, you will prove that you work for the website and that it’s not someone else pretending to be you. Your email should look like this: yourname@yourdomain.com.

Keep track of your best backlinks. For this, you can use Monitor Backlinks again. Go to your list of backlinks and sort them by Page Rank or social activity.

Add tags to the backlinks you value the most so you can verify if any of them get removed.

Select your backlink and click “edit.”

Add your tag, so you can later filter and find these backlinks easily.

After you have created your list, filter them by your tags, and monitor if their status changes. If any of these links are removed, you should contact the webmaster and ask why they removed your link.

4. Secure Your Website from Malware and Hackers

Security is extremely important. The last thing you want is spam on your website without you even knowing about it. There are several things you can do to secure your website:

If you are using WordPress, install the Google Authenticator Plugin and create a 2-step verification password. Each time you log in to your WordPress website, you will be required to add a code generated by Google Authenticator on your smartphone (available on iOS and Android).

Create a strong password with numbers and special characters.

Create backups of your files and database on a regular basis.

If your website lets users upload files, talk to your hosting company and ask them how you can install antivirus to prevent malware.

5. Check for Duplicate Content

One of the most common techniques spammers use is content duplication. They copy your website content and post it everywhere they can. If most of your content is duplicated, there’s a big possibility that your website will be penalized and lose rankings.

You can check if your website has duplicate pages on the internet using Copyscape.com. Simply add your website, or the body of the article you want to verify, and it will show you if your content is being published somewhere else, without your permission.

6. Monitor Your Social Media Mentions

Sometimes, spammers will create fake accounts on social media using your company or website name. Try to remove these profiles by reporting them as spam before they start to get followers.

To find out who is using your brand name, you can use tools like Mention.net.

As soon as someone mentions your name on any social media or website, you will be informed, and you can decide whether you should take action.

Create an account and click “Create alert.” Name your alert, and add the keywords you want to be alerted about. You can use multiple languages, too. Click “Next step.”

Select the sources you want Mention.net to look for, and add the domains you want to be ignored. Click “Create my alert,” and you will receive alerts every time your keyword (company name) is mentioned on social media, blogs, forums, and news.

7. Watch Your Website Speed

If your website suddenly has a very high loading time, make sure it’s not because someone is sending thousands of requests per second to your server. If you don’t act fast to stop this, spammers may put down your server.

A great tool that can help you monitor your server uptime and loading time is Pingdom.com.

Create an account and activate “email alerts,” so you will know when your website is down. If your site is being attacked, contact your hosting company and ask for support as soon as possible.

8. Don’t be a Victim of Your Own SEO Strategies

Make sure you are not hurting your website rankings by using techniques that are not acceptable to Google. These are some of the things you should not do:

Don’t link to penalized websites.

Don’t buy links from blog networks, and don’t buy links at all for SEO.

Don’t publish a massive number of low quality guest posts.

Don’t build too many backlinks to your website using “money keywords.” At least 60% of your anchor texts should use your website name.

Don’t sell links on your website without using the “nofollow” attribute.

9. Don’t Make Enemies Online

There is no reason to create enemies. Don’t ever argue with clients because you never know who you are dealing with. There are three types of spammers and reasons why they spam:

For fun

For revenge

To outrank competition in search engines

How to Combat Negative SEO Against Your Website

If you notice that someone has started a negative SEO campaign against your company, here’s what you can do:

1. Create a List with the Backlinks You Should Remove

Check the links to your website that were recently created, and choose the bad ones, so you can try to remove them. Add tags to your bad links. Check these manually and decide which ones are hurting your rankings, and try to remove them.

Create this list as soon as you receive email alerts with new backlinks you are not aware of, if they look like spam.

2. Try to Remove the Bad Links

After identifying the backlinks you should remove, contact the webmaster of the website and request that your link be removed. If you can’t find any contact page, use Whois.com/whois to find a contact email address.

Add the root domain of the website you are trying to contact and look for “Registrant email.”

If your link is not removed and you don’t get an answer, either, you can contact the company that’s hosting the website and ask them to remove the spammy links. Most hosting companies will help you and remove the links.

Great list, thanks for sharing. I didn’t know you could use Google Authentication with WordPress. This is very helpful!

One piece of information I’d disagree with is the threat of duplicate content. Matt Cutts has said on numerous occasions that duplicate content can never penalize a website in the SERPs.

If your website is credited with publishing the content first, then Google will see it as the “canonical” source of that content, and give you credit. This means that even if 1,000 other websites exactly copy and publish your content, they are only harming themselves on Google, because Google won’t rank them higher than you (unless, of course, the website that copies your content is The Huffington Post, but that’s a whole other issue).

Publishers need only worry about duplicate content if they are the ones doing the duplicating, and only because their efforts are wasted–it won’t rank well. Duplicate content, however, can never be used as an NSEO tactic, as it just won’t work.

The problem is that it creates a whole lot more work for small website owners. We have just had one of our sites badly hit by a Manual Action. It looks like a directory network has copied on of our articles and spammed it all over the web. After two days of digging through backlink files and emailing website owners requesting the articles to be removed, we are left with the prospect of waiting weeks or even months for Google to correct the situation, (if they do) and in the mean time we are losing $50 – $100 per day…

Google has missed the mark on this one badly. Big companies win, small business loses out.

Another way to prevent from being hacked can be constantly diversifying your website and upgrading your CMS when new updates are pushed. Removing old or outdated plugins would also help. Good Post by the way :)

Google has motivated Black hat SEOs to do negative SEO by penalizing website for bad backlinks, instead of discounting them.

I am unsure on why Google took this step. It was a good move by Google in past to discount backlinks. But now they are penalizing website. This has increase negative SEO threat to successful website owners.

Your points are very sensible but it’s too tough and costly to implement… This has been an additional cost to website owners :(

Although I will go along with the rest of your post, on this one Altaf is right and you’re wrong.

There is no logical reason at all for disavow except it is all about Google. It does not stop traffic. It only removes penalties with no reason to exist anyhow. Beyond neutralization of a link as having no benefit to a website on back link profile, there is no reason to do more.

By penalizing versus neutralizing which Google can do on its on behind the scenes all they accomplished was to incentivize negative SEO more and make webmasters wary of establishing incoming links that could be perfectly legitimate and beneficial both to the website and positive user experience beyond the click reach of just Google it.

Most webmasters, especially the ones like myself that go back to a day that pre-existed search engines understand this sort of thing is about the search engine and nothing else where it places itself above everything.

Apparently most SEO experts don’t get this but the old webmasters know where this industry came from and how it is the flip side of the search engine that makes its living off it so no matter what the engine does that makes the situation harder, it is only a benefit to SEO experts that they are just that much more in demand.

If you can handle a post all about this, I just wrote it. 5,400 words so pack a lunch if you come and I will clearly explain the 20 year long view of this to you, from the very beginning, from someone that was there and saw it all happen step by step.

I really appreciate your efforts in giving us such valuable information. It really helps me in knowing some unknown facts.

Can you please let me know how to avoid such situations. If a spammer is spamming my website then I would be knowing about the unnatural link building by the virtue of this software, but if the spammer goes on doing it continuously then is it possible to track down every day for a single project. My only concern is that How can we avoid the spammer’s activity???

Thanks a lot for contributing such a good article in this competitive world. I really love your article. We should care for negative SEO, But I don’t want it open to all. If rivals use it as a weapon, it’ll be harmful.

Just because people buy and sell such junk on Fiverr, and some black hats were able to take out other black hats – does NOT mean that it works on sites that have not already done enough of their own link spamming.

If you already have a bunch of paid links and overused your keywords in other crappy links – then, yeah, you should worry. But you did it to yourself.

Every “example” of negative SEO that I have seen turned out to be a site that already had a lot of other things going on before the so-called attack. Unless you have found a verifiable case study of a “clean” site that was actually knocked down by negative SEO, this is just more fear mongering. It is also irresponsible as it gives less informed consumers a completely wrong idea about what SEO is, and can do.

According to the text in the Disavow Tool itself, it is for disavowing any links you believe are causing harm, but you can not control – meaning you are unable to remove them yourself.

I know that many of the Negative SEO doomsayers claim that Google made the disavow tool specifically for negative SEO, but that is not the case. And that is a very good reason to check with Google FIRST, before you believe all the scary things on some forum or blog.

From Google’s support page about the disavow tool at https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487 :
“In some circumstances, incoming links can affect Google’s opinion of a page or site. For example, you or a search engine optimizer (SEO) you’ve hired may have built bad links to your site via paid links or other link schemes that violate our quality guidelines.”

The best way to fight web spam is to build credibility and trust that no search engine can ignore.”I’m not saying it’s impossible for an unscrupulous competitor to undermine your website, but if you have been doing everything “right” since the beginning it’s not going to be an easy job for them. Established sites that put out a lot of great content, are active in social media and have built up their authority aren’t going to be ruined by a handful of links generated by a spammer.

I have heard a rumor that Google may be coming out with something similar to the Bing disavow link tool within the next few months? This will obviously be a big help for people trying desperately to clean up their back link profiles and get back on Google’s good side. It could also mean spammers have another tool at their disposal to further assist them, another double edged sword I suppose.

Yes negative seo can and does work. In our case it happened co-incidentally in the month after I came back to my former employer and pushed for the seo company to be sacked. I chose to analyse every single back link and disavow. Very time consuming but it worked for us. No mamual penalty but huge drops in ranking for most commercial keywords.

I must say that some of these tips are not practical for larger sites. The Monitor backlinks email alerts for example. I work with a site that gets anywhere between 8K and 20K new backlinks a day, so I don’t want to know how the email would look like in my inbox. :)

Hi Felix,
Great post.Thanks for sharing such a great video of Matt Cutt.And yes negative seo can harm a site in many ways,specially by hacking a site.And from this wonderful I get an idea of stopping bad links to our site.

Great post. I just launched our new website a few weeks back using a wordpress theme. I do blog on my site quite often and post to social media networks. I am using a site called webmeup to monitor my sites health as well as back link strategy. Your post is very informative especially post penguin Google. Thanks for the good read.

Sure it’s Google’s fault if someone can get your site down from the index. Anyway, I don’t use Google for over 2 years since they spy anywhere and everywhere and I don’t trust them. Using Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo is much better and secure for me and my familly.

Google is now no long a search engine – Google is an advertising company which only the money is important. Google has a real dangerous monopoly and Google is much more dangerous than Microsoft ever was. Most webmaster started to hate Google.

The search giant promotes its own Google Products pushing other businesses down on its page. This forces businesses & competitors to pay Google for his AdWord ($35 billion in 2011 revenue).

More and more small business websites will get punished by Google (no matter whether your websites has excellent content or not) and will be forced to use Google’s Adwords.

I had a legitimate web business destroyed by Google one year ago for no other reason than what it considers ‘black hat seo’ which I had no clue about nor any involvement with. Google acted as judge and jury. Google being able to indiscriminately penalise SME’s without proper due diligence.

Remember, Google have the content of the ENTIRE internet and power full link- and relation computation at their disposal.
They use whois info, cookies, domain owner info, links, logged history, refferer data, e-mail, profile names, website titles etc. to look at relations between links.

Thanks for this post, I was looking for a good explanation of Negative SEO to show to a client who I now believe is under attack. Everything was here and you reiterated what I said to my client: “Prevention is much easier than cure!”.

Everything in life has a system, and every system can be beat. We had a legitimate website destroyed by Google for no other reason. Google acted as judge and jury to discriminating without proper due diligence.

As matt cutts explained that there will not be much importance given to guest post links, so is that negative SEO thing still gonna work? I guess there will be some impact of this agorithm on negative seo also.

I had never seen a so detailed guide for techniques to avoid being victim of negative SEO. I would just like to ad that it might be interesting to ask webmasters to remove the links before using the disavow tool.

I experienced many competitors of our client using spam link building to damage SEO of our client.. For this I certainly recommend using Google Alert as also suggested by John Locke. Great article with few good tips… Many thanks for sharing

Negative SEO is very harmful for the online business or website and we need to aware from it. This post is very good and informative to understand how we can protect our website from negative SEO attack.

i think my blog was attacked by competitors by putting very much use external link anchor text with keywords to the same low quality sites (porn site), because I have never put a link on that site. I have use “disavow links” in webmaster tools, but the bad backlinks instead of diminishing, Increased a lot. I also had sending reconsideration review, but no response after 2 weeks.

when google panda launched on 21 May, the number of my blog visitors increased significantly, based on the data in the dashboard blogger. The first day after the google panda slide (May 22), the number of visitors increased 63.030/day, from the days usually are only 35’s thousands. Then the second day, increasing to approximately 74’s thousands, the third day, declining to 67’s thousands, the 4th day = 63’s thousands, the 5th day= 53’s thousands, the 6th day= 50’s thousands and the 7th day visitor numbers back like before Google launched the Panda 4.0 on 21 May. Feeling awkward, I check in webmaster tools, and it turns out I got the message “manual action because of unnatural backlinks that go to my blog (partial match)”.

Then I check backlinks in the “links to your site”. I get a few domains that have links leading to my blog, with considerable amounts. In fact, I rarely hunt backlinks, especially to those sites that I consider to be the problem. Then, why my link is on these sites?.

After getting the message, I immediately sent “disavow links” and send a message reconsideration. But till date I have not received a response.

Long before getting that message, I’ve actually made a “disavow links” to the domain or the sites, but strange, instead of diminishing, increased much. Then I let it go, because it would be so tired to make “disavow links” is too much. Finally, my blog has detected webspam manual action of unnatural backlinks (partial match).

Very detailed.However, I need your help.I started a directory website, its nearly a month old.Haven’t bought any backlinks whatsoever.It has around 10 no follow backlinks.For the keywords, the website ranks on the second page, and for some even on first page.All this without any do-follow backlinks.

Yesterday I noticed a visit to my website from my competitors ip.They are keeping an eye on me.My fear is that if I keep expanding, they might sabotage my website.
What should I do?Should I buy backlinks initially so that I have an initial link profile which prevents me from negative SEO, OR should I keep expanding aggressively hoping that people might link to me in the future?
My website as of now is like a clean slate.

Negative SEO works. I’ve held a number 1 position for a client for over 6 months. A competitor of his hired a well known agency to do their SEO. I am just a small freelancer.

As of 5pm last night AEST our no1 rankings dropped from 1st to 12th and 7th. The nSEOs built a bunch of anchor text amongst other low quality links/terms against us.

The funny thing is, people are sloppy. The competing SEO company placed one of the low quality links on one of their PBNs. With .com.au you can’t hide your whois. The site also doesn’t allow posts from people who don’t have access including comments.

So frustrating, unethical and in Australia against anti competition rules.

Hi Neil,
One of my Competitor trying to done my Site rank badly. He republishing my site content over the INTERNET, by doing this he has removed one of my post and now he creating many adult backlink for my site.
My Question is how can I protect him and is there any way to to inform Google about my Competitor activities ?

Very well discussed. These are the steps to take whenever you experienced a negative SEO attack on your website. We can’t avoid this bad habit especially there’s steep competition happening in SEO and algorithm changes transpiring all the time. For other’s SEO work to gain good ranking spot, they would pull down those who are seated at the right spot. We don’t have control over external factors so we might as well exercise the right amount of alertness needed to monitor our performance. Helpful tools are listed in this post, there’s no reason not to use those tools to ensure guidelines are being followed.

Good way to protect against negative SEO is to have strong backlink profile. That’s why you can’t do negative SEO to big brands. They have authority and strong backlink profile. Try to acheve the same :)

Hi Felix thanks alot for your great article. It’s enough for only using disavow link?

Someone or maybe my competitor has building a hundred spammy backlinks to my site everyday in last five days. And i don’t know how to prevent it, what i know is just created a disavow link. My question is there other altenative to prevent this spammy?

All of my ranking on Google Serp has slowly dropped. Please can you give an advice to solve this probelm… Thanks a alot and sorry about my grammar. Have a nice day.

After following your posts (and also others too) and after three years of work in SEO industry here in Slovenia, I am sincerely starting to think, proper SEO cannot be one man’s work.

Which is, at least from new beginners perpective, probably not good. And in many cases, misleading to new online marketeers because they got impression that online bussines can be done with a single man.

According to all the knowledge needed and specially to action that needs to be monitored and excecuted, one man cannot properly succedd in SEO world.

Which, consequently, brings me to conclusion that also SEO position must be bought. As PPC. Regards,

Someone Shared this post in his Facebook timeline, I was surprised seeing this post Headline, I finally decided to read this wonderful and magical informative post. I trust this article will help me to work for negative SEO.

This is really heartbreaking when someone puts you down adding bad back links.
Google is not complete until it takes this into consideration and can prevent it in a good way. I have been working hard as a professional photographer and sad to realize when competitors bring you down with simple tricks. I accept when someone is better than me but I get angry when someone can use cheap tricks to put my business in bad light for a search engine. Hard working people should not be punished like this for simple thieves. I do trust Google will find a better algorithm and logic to be able to prevent this.
Keep fighting

LOL you really believe in this balonies? Seriously, you are discovering toxic links by dozens when you competitor placing thousands from different IPs every single day. Disavov tool is used by Google to ignore URLs for Google bot and nothing else, only for Google advantage. If you are being attacked, you can say bye bye to your site. Google does not care about you. Google will never do anything to help web masters. Google will only use web masters to perfect their own search results. You people are in some kind of lala…

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